moncton - what kind of paint are you going to use?
A few general musings:
As much as the past few weeks have been a test of patience, it has been kind of fascinating watching the few leaves I didn't get to in time slowly migrate deeper into the ice. I figure their dark colour was enough to locally melt the ice (absorbing sunlight I guess) during the day and then they'd refreeze a couple mm lower the next day.
Another interesting change a few days ago was what had been a totally crystal clear piece of ice managed to have some kind of degassing event and the ice is now full of pea-sized air bubbles trapped everywhere. Doesn't photograph well for me but looks cool.
Also to undercoverbrother's comment about the ice being pretty resilient, notably the 2 inches or so of freeze I got that first night a while back persisted throughout. My problem was it sits atop several more inches of water, so I've had to wait.
The overnight snow we got a couple days ago also pebbled my surface, but about 15-20 home depot buckets of water were enough to substantially improve the smoothness.
I'll post some pictures hopefully this weekend when we inaugurate it.